In airports and other terminals for processing passengers and their baggage, it has been proposed to provide a complex handling system as described in the aforementioned copending application which can increase the throughput of the terminal, i.e. the number of passengers and amount of baggage processed from a terminal building to aircraft or vice versa per unit of time, while enhancing safety and security.
For the security of the aircraft, the latter is parked at a location remote from the terminal building, at a location at which maintenance, repair, and disembarkation can be effected under complete control and without danger of untoward incident developing out of any action at the terminal structure. The aircraft is thus not moved between landing and the start of its taxing to takeoff, while all of the maintenance, fueling and boarding and deplaning operations are carried out with the aircaft at this fixed location.
In this system, the passengers are forwarded to the aircraft from the terminal building, or are moved from the aircraft to the terminal building, upon a vehicle, hereinafter referred to as the transport vehicle, together with their baggage.
In this system, the vehicle has an elevatable end which can be raised to the level of the aircraft door or lowered to an embarkation ramp at the terminal building so that the passengers can enter the vehicle while being completely sealed against access otherwise, while their baggage on pallets, is fed in the same direction into a baggage compartment beneath the floor of the transport vehicle.
The vehicle then travels to the aircraft and is raised so that an end of the passenger compartment of the vehicle registers with the open door to allow the passengers to move into the aircraft while the baggage is withdrawn from the underlying compartment and deposited in the hold or baggage compartments of the aircraft, preferably still upon the original pallets.
At the terminal building, passengers and their baggage are separated at the check-in station, with the baggage being placed upon pallets assigned to each passenger and moving through the terminal building along the route of the passenger who proceeds, after check-in, to a reception room to await arrival of or loading of the transport vehicle. The baggage pallets can travel along a conveyor path beneath the floor of the terminal hallways traversed by the passengers.
Thus, in spite of the fact that the passengers and the baggage move separately through the terminal building, they generally pass simultaneously and synchronously to and from the transport vehicle.
When the transport vehicle has an elevated end adapted to be raised to the level of the aircraft door, a set of steps can be formed to permit the passengers to climb to this level.
At the check-in station where travel documents are processed and any overweight is detected, a conveyor can be provided to deliver the pallets upon which the baggage is placed so that all the baggage of each passenger can be carried by a previously provided baggage carrier while the system as thus described and developed further in the above-identified application markedly increases the throughput of the airport and eliminates the need for complicated data processing installations for baggage identification, baggage recovery and baggage ticketing. The improvement is noticeable most significantly for embarking passengers and is less significant for deplaning passengers. In other words, the problem of recovery of baggage using the transport is still significant.